The wasted decade: In the 90’s, America had unprecedented power, but did little with it. It must now rue its lost opportunity.

In the lead article of the current issue of the US journal Foreign Affairs, Fouad Ajami describes the 1990s as "a lucky decade, a fool's paradise". It is an assessment that sets one thinking – about decades in general and about the last one in particular.

The worst decades of the 20th century were without question those that experienced World Wars I and II. Apart from the hideous carnage involved, they destroyed the accumulated social capital of a century and enormously increased the power of states over peoples' lives.

Not far behind must rank the 1930s, which saw the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist terror, the Great Depression and serious wars in China, Spain and Abyssinia. Western intellectuals deserted liberal democracy in droves, lured by the false gods of communism and fascism. W.H. Auden, as representative a figure of the 1930s as anyone, famously looked back and declared it "a low, dishonest decade".

Then there were the 1960s. These were years of mass starvation and "Cultural Revolution" in China, and of the Vietnam War. In the West they saw the attempt of middle-class adolescents, the first generation of the new affluence, to subvert the institutions of liberal societies by "direct action". In their appalling ignorance, many of them enthusiastically waved the Little Red Book of a mass murderer as they did so.

Compared with this lot, the last decade of the century looks pretty good at first glance. While some terrible things happened, particularly in Central Africa and the Balkans, they were outnumbered by the good things: the collapse of Soviet communism, the end of the Cold War, the spread of democracy, sustained and widespread prosperity, great advances in technology.

Well, yes, all true as far as it goes and all very important. But a decade can be judged in terms of what did not happen as well as in terms of what did, by sins of omission as well as ones of commission. In these terms, the last decade of the 20th century is surely one of prodigiously wasted opportunities. The good guys enjoyed an unprecedented dominance and made little use of it.

Part of the explanation is that for most of the decade the United States was presided over by William Jefferson Clinton. Clinton was a marvellously adroit politician with an impressive capacity to charm the American people. But in terms of statesmanship, a commodity that the times urgently required, he was a non-starter. Opportunistic, vacillating, irresponsible and ultimately frivolous, he improvised his way through the decade, day by day. At a time when the world needed an architect, it was in the hands of a saxophone player.

But it would be a serious mistake to blame everything on Clinton. The truth is that at the very time when the US was left unchallenged in its supremacy ("the unipolar movement"), the American people were profoundly tired of foreign involvements. After strenuous decades of Cold War, they wanted to be a normal country again, to enjoy the supposed "peace dividend". In the presidential elections of the decade, foreign policy barely rated a serious mention.

This combination of indifference at ground level and an absence of leadership at the top meant that America managed to be neither bold nor prudent in the use of its vast power. Instead of respecting Churchill's maxim, "in victory, magnanimity", and working to integrate a Russia freed of communism into the international system, Washington chose to advance a military alliance towards the border of that humiliated country. Instead of recognising that China was making rapid progress towards becoming a market economy and that its communism was a dying creed, the US vacillated between designating that country its next great enemy and embracing it as a "strategic partner". Instead of creating new institutions for a new era, old ones notably NATO – were twisted into new shapes and made to perform functions for which they were ill designed.

This was the decade of the self-proclaimed cheap hawks, prepared to will the end but not the means (they included Newt Gingrich, for a few months the most powerful man in American politics). It was the decade of no-casualties-at-any-cost pseudo wars; of the retaliatory strike as media event; and of the complacent belief that impersonal forces (democratisation, globalisation, interdependence) could be trusted to do the job that in reality required deliberate policy and will.

Much of this cast of mind is reflected in what became a key term of art in the '90s: "soft power". Coined by Joseph Nye of Harvard, it referred to the influence of American culture, broadly defined, on the rest of the world: Disneyland and McDonald's; CNN and Hollywood; rap music and jeans; Harvard and The Simpsons – and a thousand other things.
The term "soft power" was and is very seductive. It promises that one's will can prevail without the need for coercion; indeed, that one can prevail almost by osmosis, without doing anything, but just by being. The concept was made to measure for an American decade that wanted the palm without the dust.

But there are at least three things wrong with "soft power". First, strictly speaking it is not really power, not the ability to impose one's will on others. Most of its manifestations do not represent an expression of any deliberate or unified American will. Many of its effects are inadvertent and pull in conflicting directions. And it is worth bearing in mind that, in so far as it is a reality, Americans are just as much subject to it as is the rest of the world.

Second, much of what is covered by the term represents not what is best about America (which is very good indeed) but what is most repugnant: a crass, hedonistic, violence-ridden, sex-obsessed popular culture. In so far as this amounts to "power", it is difficult to see what US national interest it could serve.

Third, and to some extent following on from this last point, the belief that it offers the US a cheap and easy option, a way of prevailing without pain, overlooks one thing: soft power can and often does generate very hard resentment. When it does it becomes necessary to forget fanciful notions and respond in terms of old-fashioned hard power.

Fouad Ajami was right to refer to the 1990s as a lucky decade. But an even better label would be the wasted decade, something that is becoming increasingly evident now that the luck has run out.

The bad news is that we are now living with the consequences of that waste. The better news is that there is some ground for believing that America's affairs are once again in the hands of competent adults.

About the Author:
Owen Harries was for 16 years the editor-in-chief of the Washington-based foreign policy journal, The National Interest. He is now a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies.